Chapter Text
The drone view of Gurathin’s apartment revealed that he was in the living room, pacing a little impatiently ahead of my impending arrival. Good. I opened his door without announcement, strode in, and marched him backwards at sword point until he was up against the wall, hands raised, the blade resting featherlight at his throat, pulse dancing under its edge. He’d smiled when he first saw me, although now his face had taken on a curious, playful expression. Heartbeat raised, slightly flustered, but not afraid. Good.
“You,” I growled, “Are an infuriating, augmented menace.” (Mostly to my sanity, admittedly, but whatever).
“Uh, nice to see you too,” he said. Then his gaze flicked to the blade. “Why are you pointing a plastic sword at me?”
“Because getting a real one past security was too much hassle to be worth it,” I said, still in the growly tone, “And because somebody thought it was a good idea to go playing with a collection of ancient lethal weapons whilst I was gone despite my expressly saying not to do anything dangerous.” His smile turned even more mischievous.
“It’s fun. You should try it.”
“Oh I will. I’m going to inspect every last object, person and procedure there. And also wear the cool armour, rescue the princess and defeat the hostile giant fauna, if required.” He laughed a bit then. “Are you the princess?” I asked, on a teasing afterthought with an embarrassingly high element of rescue fantasy.
“No.” He looked somewhat put out. “They want me to play some evil knight who abducts the princess in the first place. Apparently, I have a great villain face.” Ha! Maybe this re-enactment society wasn’t so bad after all.
“You do,” I said. His expression turned calculating, and I had time to think it was quite a good villain face, when he said, slyly,
“I guess I better surrender then.”
“Yes, you had.” The sword clattered to the floor as I seized him and kissed him with all the pent-up desire of too long away. A moment of brief startlement, and then he was kissing me back just as fervently. I picked him up, carried him through to the bedroom and tossed him on the bed, then started hastily getting both our clothes off.
“You know,” he panted, as I kissed and nipped down the side of his throat, “If I’m going to get this reaction to a couple of pictures of myself in a knight outfit, I’m going to try every re-enactment society out there. And maybe even a Sanctuary Moon cosplay convention, if I really want to abandon my dignity.” Dammit, that got a whimper out of me, and he grinned in triumph.
Menace, I repeated, trying to clear my head of those images, trailing hands across his body, mapping every line and contour, every colour, and updating it with the mental map I had of him. The pattern of light and dark shading had changed, like a slow shifting of clouds across the sky, and I traced the new borders with my fingertips.
Unpredictable, I murmured, tangling us in the feed, nudging into his augments, wanting access to every part of him.
What…he said, distracted, What are we doing here?
You’re surrendering, I said, and a shudder went through him. Although maybe that was because I had just lightly nipped at one of his nipples. He connected more fully with me, and I shuddered in sync as I tried that again.
I played with his sensations for a while, feeling through his augments an echo of the twinned trail of my fingertips and lips on his body, and his on mine, but after a bit I decided to make him wait, and simply held him down whilst I shifted purely to the shared pleasure of our interface. Or tried to. He did not, of course, surrender. This was Gurathin we’re talking about here. No, he had set up a clever little nested series of firewalls, like the concentric curtain walls of castle Irundell, and I tussled with him for access, a playful back and forth that echoed our verbal sparring, and that delighted and frustrated me in equal measure, as I tried to gain the key to unlock each one. Time for a new tactic. I played my fingers teasingly down his ribs, and he squirmed, ticklish, his concentration broken.
That’s cheating! he protested.
Did you expect me to fight fair? But I stopped after a moment, as I successfully breached the third wall. Two more to go. Each level granted a deeper level of connection and intimacy, from entwining our feed presences further, to deepening the interface, to giving me access to his physical sensations. I could choose what I did and did not want via locking or unlocking the gates in each ‘wall’, which I appreciated: I had not gone deep into the physical side of things, whereas Gurathin was more guarded about his mind. But tonight I wanted everything. All of him. And he gave it. The final gate unlocked, I found a treasure chest of code that he had been evidently been tweaking for weeks; when I ran the programme, it was as if the organic and inorganic parts of me finally meshed seamlessly, as our entwined machine elements sent sensations directly to my organic neurochemistry, and back again.
More, please, I begged, almost incoherent, and having quite lost the upper hand somewhere along the way, which I no longer cared in the least about. I just wanted more of what he was doing to me.
Shh, let me take care of you, he said. For a moment, I fought the loss of control, but he was ever patient, and so I let go; surrendered, even, and let him do whatever magic he was doing until intense pleasure washed over me and through into him in a long endless wave and I quite forgot about anything else.
Eventually, I came back to myself a bit to find my head pressed into his chest and my hands gripping his shoulders, squashing him somewhat. His hand was stroking through my hair, very tenderly, which made my feelings expand almost unmanageably.
“Ungh,” I said, intelligently, and felt him smile against the top of my head.
Good? He asked. We were back to a somewhat more normal level of feed connection, though still far more than what I would do with anyone else.
Like you need to ask, asshole, I said, affectionately. I could feel his arousal pressing against me from where I lay on top of him, whatever organic/inorganic translation that had worked on my brain chemistry clearly not going fully the other way, despite the way my pleasure had fed back to him. But he was human, after all, and humans needed the physical, at least some of the time. I lifted my head and accidentally went full-on up-close eye contact, which I couldn’t deal with, mostly because of the emotion in his gaze, so I leaned down and kissed him, gently this time, closing my eyes. A soft moan escaped him.
I really think I need to go take care of myself, he sent, sounding apologetic, which I didn’t want.
No, I’m taking care of you, I said, firmly, Well, indirectly, anyway. I resumed my previous exploration of his body with my hands, mouthing at strategic points…under the line of his jaw, down the side of his neck, those curiously responsive nipples, until he was writhing under me. Then I shifted off him and pulled him close to me so that his back was against my chest, held securely. Touch yourself, I said, re-connecting to his augments so I could feel his physical sensations again.
Um, are you sure? I nibbled his ear, and repeated the command. I felt it through him as he wrapped his hand around himself. He moved a little slowly at first, awkwardly, self-conscious, perhaps, but I encouraged him. I moved a drone around so that I could watch his face through its camera as he did it, which was a lot more stimulating than I’d imagined, especially with all the sounds he was making. (I was rapidly adding them all to my carefully curated folder of Gurathin noises). I fed the camera view into his visual augments and he flushed even darker and looked down.
No. Look at me, I said. I meant at the camera drone, but he understood and complied. I looked up at it as well, over his shoulder, and this time when I met his eyes it was through the shared camera feed view. This made him groan even louder, and speed the movement of his hand. Sensation was now flooding back into me from him, the tide of our shared pleasure now reversed, as he rode higher and higher to the crest of his wave. He stuttered words between his heaving breaths, half out loud and half to my mind.
“More, please, so good…”
You’ve really not behaved yourself whilst I’ve been away, I said, teasing with my hands in all the places I knew he liked, I shouldn’t reward such reckless behaviour. But you were very good to me before. Are you going to be good for me now?
Yes, yes, I’ll be good for you.
Surrender, I commanded.
Yes. Whatever you want. I’ll do it…he managed. Catching his gaze again in the drone camera, I made him watch as I wrapped my larger hand around his own; through the feedback in his augments it was easy to control his movements, now faster, now slower, ratcheting up the tension and the pleasure and then dialling it down again, making him wait. He shoved his other hand in his mouth, biting on his fist as he whined around it, eyes closing, sweat-damp hair sticking to his forehead in disarray.
Look at me, I told him again, and he tried, but his concentration was clearly shot to pieces. I stopped the movement of my hand completely, holding his prisoner in mine, still. Tell me, I said, pulling his fist away from his mouth with my other hand and holding his jaw captive instead, keeping his head up facing the drone. I wanted to hear him.
“Fuck, please…” he begged, sounding wrecked, “Please, Murderbot…I want you so badly.” I rewarded him with one movement of my hand on his: up, down, stop. “Fuck! Please. Want you, need you…” he descended into incoherence as I resumed moving my hand, then he looked straight at me again through the camera. “Love you,” he managed, and on one last stroke he crested the wave, crying out, his body shuddering against mine. His pleasure crashed into me through his augments, which was intense, almost as good as what he'd done to me. (Fortunately I managed to remember to remove my hand again before I got more of a share of his fluids than I wanted).
He collapsed limply back against me, trying to get his breath back. A few tears were leaking from his eyes. I wiped them away with a finger.
Love you too, I said, which made more tears come. Fuck’s sake. That was supposed to stop you crying, I added.
Good crying, he said, Happy. Clearly this was a Gurathin thing. Or a post-sex thing. Who knew, with him?
You are so weird.
It’s not a me thing, it’s a human thing.
Humans are weird, but I still held onto him, because he was looking oddly vulnerable. The flow of emotion through the feed was raw…but gradually he settled into a more contented state, getting sleepy.
I should clear up, he said, rousing himself after a few minutes of quiet, so I let him up.
Are you watching media? he asked, when he came back from the bathroom, with some clean sheets, muttering something about wearing a sheath next time and saving us both the mess. I shifted off the bed, somewhat reluctantly.
Of course, I replied. (I wasn’t, I was perusing the ‘Remote/feed controlled sex toys,’ section of ART’s helpful file, which I’d previously dumped in the ‘Maybe’ category and was now deciding was worth a more careful look). He smiled fondly at me, unsuspecting, and pulling on one of my T-shirts to wear to bed.
New season of Timestream Defenders Orion coming out next month, he said, Think Lieutenant Nguyen’s alive after all?
I want him to be, but ART will be needlessly smug about its theory being proven right if he is. I wandered off into the bathroom whilst he sorted out the sheets; I was a bit sweaty myself, so went and had a quick shower. We could just shower together next time, I suggested, which got an affirmative over the feed that for some reason was accompanied with an utterly incoherent burst of emotional metadata. Filed that away for future reference as well. Reducing him to a pile of begging mush was even more satisfying than beating him in an argument. And, yeah, I like to win. Although all that had felt like - mutual winning, or something. Which was maybe even better. Huh.
I pounced on him when I came out of the bathroom, just for the hell of it, which made him laugh and protest that he had already surrendered. I pulled him on top of me in our usual position; I liked my augmented human security blanket and felt his contentment mirroring my own. He felt safe with me, safer than he had ever felt. It was almost as good as the love. It was love, I suppose, that word humans used to mean so many different things.
I started playing Sanctuary Moon, as Gurathin dozed off on top of me. Whatever you called it, it was as close to pure happiness as I had ever come.